Here is a list I have formed:
-Switch to Esim
-Build more apartments
-Use shampoo/conditioner bars
-Put carbon labels on products
-Buy stuff at the store
-Eat plant based
-Prioritize transit over cars
-Switch to Ecosia
-Recycle
-Give homemade gifts
-Compost
-Be organized
-Avoid synthetic cloths
-Switch to green burials
-Buy reputable carbon credits
-Mandate microfibre filters for washing machines
-Install Linux on old computers
-Switch to Electric car -Shut down all oil operations
-Pickup litter
-Ride your bicycle instead of the car
-Adopt kids and companions instead
-Build more green spaces
-Convert animal agriculture land to wild lands
-Support repairability
-Ban private jets
Making public transit accessible, reliable, fast, clean, and completely free will encourage people to ditch their cars. I’d like to see privately owned cars completely banned in cities and towns with a population of >1000 people, but that’s a step for after setting up public transit services to handle the load.
Build a robust high speed rail network and ban short flights of <4 hours.
Requiring much longer warranties on consumer goods in general, paired with strong right to repair bills.
Requiring all software source code to be released to the public after the company stops maintaining the product will keep an enormous number of devices useful for longer too, and will improve efficiency.
Patents expire after 4 years; if a company came up with a patent that improves efficiency of something, keeping it behind massive fees will limit the adoption and advancement of that technology.
Banning crypto mining.
Reducing concrete in construction projects in favour of mass timber from sustainably sourced forests (the wood building materials are a form of carbon storage), and bamboo construction (even more sustainable than wood, though more difficult to work with?)
Requiring all office work to allow working from home most of the time.
Wow I just ranted about this yesterday! I really hope this idea catches on. We really need to accelerate adoption of improvements.
Patents are a double-edged sword, the initial goal is to encourage R&D investment, but in practice patents are made to create exclusive control over who can use that technology. I think it’s okay for patents to exist, but they should expire fast rather than letting the company who owns the patent to rest on their laurels with their monopoly over their invention, this way we can iterate and improve upon it.
Patents taking very long to expire may have made sense back in the day when technology adoption was slower (although I think they were too long for even back then). In the modern era, our tools allows for a much faster time-to-market, so keeping the duration of the parents is even more harmful.
We can see it all the time, and a fun example of it would be Cherry switches; they invented the MX style switch and have done minimal improvements for a long time, and once the patent expired, competitors started selling MX clones (clones were available in china before the patent expired, but there weren’t as many as there are now), this meant that Cherry switches were now the inferior in quality to the clones, which is better for the consumer; had the patent expired sooner, both Cherry and competitors would have started the iterative race much earlier.
Another example is the pacojet; a commercial instant ice cream maker which costs $6000 and had no competition, so no reason for the company to improve it. After the patent expire Ninja made a $300 home version of this which is in some aspects superior to the original.
This is why I proposed, instead of completely abolishing all patents, to shorten the lifespan of the patent. Some inventions shouldn’t be patentable, like pharmaceuticals; because even for a short time, gatekeeping a lifesaving product behind a massive paywall is insane.
I think there should be some kind of legal/constitutional mechanism that gives the state power to declare a certain invention as “significant for the public’s well being” and expunge the patent, paying a reasonable compensation fee to the patent holder.
Yes exactly! It’s still very rare to see these arguments. I think 3D printers and things like patent trolls and video codec / av1 have made people realize the problems patents cause.
Maybe another way would be for the UN to push for legislation for some kind of “moratorium” on any patents relevant to climate change. So that the corporation people don’t loose their shit.
And maybe a court system with a reimbursement scheme that is funded by many countries to reward R&D but only as something like 400% or even 1000% of investment costs - but not based on some hypothetical future loss of fantastical profits.
There is also the idea of a patentleft licenses but I don’t think they would have significant impact, since not producing anything still allows you to sue and block progress.
Exactly, otherwise companies would rob the state out of too much money, making this system useless.
And I like the patentleft system, which is similar to copyleft. I don’t know what the ideal patent reform would look like, but it has to change because the current system is terrible for innovation.